Brenda Ran Boston!

My friend, Brenda (with me at L2L tri last summer, she is on the right), who was also crazy enough to sign up for AZ Ironman, ran the Boston Marathon today. She had qualified for it before the IM idea came up so Boston was her "A" race for quite awhile. Many of our group runs were centered around her training plan or Dan's (who is training for Colorado marathon) and we were all excited for her to go.

Anyway, she finished in 3:58, which is really a good time for a race like that. Boston is not a good race to PR in - there are thousands of people on a skinny road and its just not known for fast times. And from what I hear, she went out too fast and couldn't maintain that pace at the end. But good for her for trying!

I learned some things from Brenda. She was so diligent about her training and I really admire her for that. I took many shortcuts in my Ironman training and Brenda is the kind of person that if her training plan called for 10 miles and our training run ended up being 9.7, she would go out and run .3 mile more.

I was also amazed at how much she was running. One weekend when i ran with her, she had run 10 mile the day before, 20 on Saturday, spin bike on Sunday, 8 on Monday, 6 on Tuesday, 5 on Weds, off on Thursday and 10 again on Friday. It was insane!  Never in my wildest dreams would I run that much when training for a marathon!  Now, I look back at my training for marathons - back when I ran marathons - and I can see how wimpy my training was!  

But there were no training plans back then. There wasn't even the internet back then, except for the last few I ran. All I knew was that I needed a long run every weekend and that's what I did. No speedwork, no tempo runs, no hill repeats, nada. Just 3-7 mile runs during the week and one long run on the weekend (and I took the other day off).

I'm happy for Brenda and looking forward to training with her for Arizona!

One more thing about Boston. I was so excited about running it and had such a wonderful time, that I wrote my all-time favorite article for the Greeley Tribune when I got back. At that time I was writing a monthly nutrition column and they asked me to write about my experience running the Boston marathon when I got back. I remember sitting at the computer and my hands just started writing. It flowed so easily whereas my nutrition columns were difficult or sometimes boring to write. This article came straight from my heart and i still treasure it to this day.

Now....what am I blogging about....oh yeah, training for the AZ Ironman triathlon!  What have I dont this last week? 

After seeing Todd last Weds for the amazing, fantastic, magical needle therapy that has literally worked wonders in my tensor fascia lata, I did the following:

Thursday: ran 38 mins slow and easy
Friday: swam 1400 yards
Saturday: ran 30 mins
Sunday: biked 31 miles - awesome ride!
Monday (today): Master's swim, 1600 fast yards - about killed my shoulders!

Tomorrow I have to get up super early but will plan to run for 45 mins before getting kids to school, then off to class.

Congrats to Brenda and here's to an exciting year ahead!